We don't say any more; she sits down on a footstool with her head against my knee, and I just smooth it. When the clocks strike ten through the house, she rises, and I stand up. I see that she has been crying quietly,--poor, lonely, little soul! I lift her off her feet and kiss her, and stammer out my sorrow at losing her, and she is gone. Next morning the little maid brought me an envelope from the lady who left by the first train. It held a little gray glove. That is why I carry it always, and why I haunt the inn and never leave it for longer than a week; why I sit and dream in the old chair that has a ghost of her presence always, dream of the spring to come with the May-fly on the wing, and the young summer when midges dance, and the trout are growing fastidious; when she will come to me across the meadow grass, through the silver haze, as she did before,--come with her gray eyes shining to exchange herself for her little gray glove. AN EMPTY FRAME. It was a simple, pretty little frame, such as you may buy at any sale cheaply; its ribbed wood, aspinalled white, with an inner frame of pale-blue plush; its one noticeable feature that it was empty. And yet it stood on the middle of the bedroom mantelboard. It was not a luxurious room; none of the furniture matched. It was a typical boarding-house bedroom. Any one preserving the child habit of endowing inanimate objects with human attributes might fancy that the flickering flames of the fire took a pleasure in bringing into relief the bright bits in its dinginess; for they played over the silver-backed brushes and the cut-glass perfume bottles on the dressing-table, flicked the bright beads on the toes of coquettish small shoes and the steel clasps of a travelling bag in the corner, imparting a casual air of comfort such as the touch of certain dainty women lends to a common room. A woman enters,--a woman wondrously soft and swift in all her movements. She seems to reach a place without your seeing how; no motion of elbow or knee betrays her. Her fingers glide swiftly down the buttons of her gown; in a second she has freed herself from its ensheathing; garment after garment falls from her, until she stands almost free. She gets into nightdress and loose woollen dressing-gown, and slips her naked feet into fur-lined slippers, with a movement that is somehow the expression of an intense nervous relief from a thrall. Everything she does is done so swiftly that you see the result rather than the working out of each action.